TV Shows Watched: Dune: prophecy- S1E2 (MAX) with audio description, The Franchise: S1E8 (MAX) with audio description, Somebody Somewhere- S3E4 (MAX) with audio description, Tracker: S2E7 (Paramount Plus) with audio description, and Have I Got News For you: Season Finale (MAX) no audio description.
Podcasts: Every Single Sci-Fi Movie Ever (The Creature From The Black Lagoon) and Next Best Picture (interview: Alan Mencken)
YouTube: The Awards Contender (Review: Gladiator 2)
Movies Watched: No Other Land (Screener) No Audio Description, The Lost Children (Netflix) no audio description, Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind (Digital Copy/Apple Store) with audio description
Of the five shows I watched, the best audio description would be a battle between Dune: Prophecy and Tracker. honestly, Tracker does what it needs to do every week in terms of clues, but rarely commits to character descriptions for episode specific characters. It does have a perfect narrator voice, and I’ve enjoyed watching Tracker now into its second season, so something has to be said for that if I’m giving it the slight edge. It isn’t so much that I feel that the audio description for Dune Prophecy is heavily deficient, it just has *so much* to describe in every episode. There are tons of things that have no basis in reality, so they need to be described so we can understand them. The show has a billion characters, who are mostly criminally underdeveloped, and hard t follow. And, this is still at the beginning, so we are still world building, meaning we’re still seeing people, places, and things for the first time. I want to love this show more, but I just can’t.
The Franchise ended, and the audio description never blew me away. The show sometimes was funny, but sometimes not. Not every joke lands, and while I think the narrator as a human is the right choice, over the run I did want more from the audio description in terms of it being about moviemaking, superheroes, fantastical worlds and visual effects, weird creatures, etc. It is very bland for what it is.
